This invention relates generally to oil and gas production, and in particular to the processing of seismic data to facilitate oil and gas production.
Existing interpretation of seismic data faces a number of significant challenges. First, undiscovered oil and gas reservoirs are often contained in subtle traps at very low depth or in stratigraphic traps that are difficult to detect in a single seismic volume. Second, the amount of seismic data and attributes that can now be obtained for each seismic volume typically far exceeds the interpretation capability of human interpreters. As a result, a number of methods have been developed for automatically processing seismic data to facilitate the interpretation of the seismic data.
For example, there are a number of existing methods for applying pattern recognition and data mining techniques to seismic data. However, many of the existing methods have been limited to pre-processing seismic images to remove noise and/or utilize horizon tracking using local classification methods. In other instances, the existing methods provide automatic identification of geological features by relying upon training neural networks and other similar classifiers. Such existing methods for identifying geological features in seismic data are indirect and lack transparency.